Pet form of Susan/Susannah, from Hebrew 'shoshana' meaning 'lily' or 'rose.'
Susie descends from the ancient Hebrew Shoshannah, meaning "lily" — though scholars have long debated whether the underlying plant is more precisely the lotus or a wild rose. The name flowed into Greek as Sousanna, into Latin as Susanna, and eventually dispersed across Europe in dozens of forms. Susie is its most affectionate English diminutive, a name that feels like sunlight through a screen door — domestic, cheerful, and immediately warm.
In popular culture, Susie has been an emblem of the wholesome and the knowing in equal measure. The folk song "Oh! Susanna," penned by Stephen Foster in 1847, practically cemented the name into the American songbook, its breezy nonsense verses making Susie a fixture of parlors and campfires alike.
Decades later, Susie Salmon narrates her own murder from heaven in Alice Sebold's 2002 novel The Lovely Bones, giving the name an unexpectedly haunting literary resonance. In the comic strip Peanuts, Susie Derkins appears in the spinoff Calvin and Hobbes as Calvin's sharp, unimpressed neighbor — a Susie who refuses to suffer fools. As a standalone given name, Susie was especially fashionable in the 1940s and 1950s, evoking saddle shoes, drive-ins, and a certain postwar optimism. It has since ceded ground to Susan and Susannah as formal registers, but Susie endures as a given name in its own right among parents who prize directness and vintage charm — a name that has never really gone out of style so much as gone underground, waiting to resurface.